Wormfood (20 page)

“Don’t you fucking dare. You stinking goddamn … All right. Fuck. All right. You got it. Five hundred. You got it. I swear. Just bring the buckle here.”

I edged around the grave, staying on the outside of the canopy. The last thing I needed to do was to fall back into that quicksand nightmare. As I reached the stone slab, Bert started shrieking, clawing madly at the white plaster, “It’s in my fucking arm! It’s inside!”

Junior grabbed Bert’s cast.

Fat Ernst sidled past Junior and Bert, hand out. “Okay, boy, you made your point. Five hundred. I won’t forget, I promise. Just give it to me.”

I handed it over. Fat Ernst smiled, jerking the buckle out of my hand and slipping it inside his shirt.

Junior said, “I can’t see shit, Bert. You sure it went in there?”

Fat Ernst drew himself up, saying, “Gentlemen, I’m going to clean up and then I’ll head to Sacramento first thing in the morning.” He nodded and added, “You fellas did a good job here.”

Junior gently wiped Bert’s face with the tail of his shirt. “Come on, Bert, let’s go home. Get you some more tranquilizers.” Then he wiped some of the blood away from his own mouth.

We splashed back through the long shadows thrown by the headlights, abandoning the pump, the sledgehammer, the shovels, and the lantern. The rain was still coming down hard, but it felt good as the water slowly washed away the mud and grit on my skin. Fat Ernst didn’t say anything else, just plopped into his Cadillac and took off immediately, roaring away through the walnut orchards. Junior helped Bert into the truck and paused long enough to reel the extension cord back in. Then they too were gone, leaving me alone in the darkness and rain.

But I didn’t mind walking home. Like I said, the rain felt good on my skin. Clean, somehow. And as I walked, I had plenty of time to think about Misty.

And those goddamn worms.

When I got home, Grandma was asleep in her chair, her snoring softly echoing the white noise and static on-screen. I was glad. I didn’t want to have to explain all the mud and blood again. I’d been spending too much time with dead things lately. So I stripped out of my filthy clothes in the backyard and just sat on the steps for a while, letting the falling rain wash the rest of the mud away. After a while, I quietly crept inside and took another long, hot shower. Grandma was going to wonder why the gas bill was so high this month.

After the shower, I grabbed the W and X volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica that Grandpa had bought years ago. One winter he decided to work his way through all of the volumes. I carried the encyclopedia back to my room and turned to the section on
WORMS
.

It wasn’t much help. There wasn’t a lot of information that fit what I knew about the worms I’d seen. But what did I know about them, really? They ate meat, both alive and dead … So, let’s see, call ’em carnivores. And from what I could tell, they lived in water, both salt water and freshwater. It seemed like they burrowed into the body, eating it from the inside. But other than that, I wasn’t really sure. Whateverthey were, they sure as hell weren’t night crawlers. The only halfway useful thing I did find was something called a “Pompeii worm.” Those things lived in scalding water at the mouths of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor and could withstand temperatures up to 176 degrees Fahrenheit. That would explain how the eggs or pieces or anything else could survive being cooked inside the hamburgers, if that’s what killed Heck.

Other than that, there wasn’t much. There weren’t any pictures of worms that came even close to the things in the meat that I’d seen. Most of the worms in the encyclopedia were segmented, while the worms I was looking for were quite smooth. The section on parasitic worms looked hopeful at first, but then I realized they were all too small. You couldn’t even see most of them with the naked eye. Then it struck me—these things lived underwater. In the pit, they squirted around in the water as if propelled by rockets.

So I replaced the W and X volume and grabbed the F volume. The
FISH
section was huge, so I skimmed through most of it. It wasn’t a simple trout or goddamn goldfish swimming around in Slim’s pit. It wasn’t sharks either. But then I started reading about primitive fishes and knew I was getting closer. Especially when I saw a picture of a lamprey. Lampreys are like eels, almost snakelike in their appearance. Their mouths are round, and they seem more like a leech than anything else.

The lampreys in the picture didn’t have the tendrils around the mouth. Close, but not quite. Something else was mentioned in that section, something called a hagfish, or “slime eel,” but there weren’t any pictures.

Hagfish
, I thought. Something about the name sounded right.

I grabbed the H volume, flipped through a few pages, and there it was, staring at me, in full color and ugly as anything I’d even seen. Even Fat Ernst on the toilet couldn’t compare. A goddamn hagfish. The picture wasn’t exact; the worms I had seen had black spots running the length of their bodies, and it seemed like the tail was a little different, but it was awful close. Then I started reading, and wished I hadn’t.

Hagfish lived in the cold mud on the bottom of the ocean, in dense groups, up to
fifteen thousand
in one area. My scalp started itching, and it was all I could do not to scratch, because then I’d be scratching wildly at my whole body, chasing phantom worms all night. They would burrow into dead or dying fish and eat them from the inside. They had a large, circular mouth with a muscular tongue and two rows of strong, sharp teeth. I rubbed the circular wound on my hand. The scab was healing nicely, but it still hurt like hell.

The hagfish could reach lengths of up to three feet.

I swallowed, trying to not to picture one of those worms that big. Hagfish mostly fed off of dead whales, crawling in through the mouth, the eyes, or the anus. Ray’s voice popped up in my head, talking about Earl, “… and I ain’t talking about his goddamn mouth, neither.”

Everything fell into place, into perfect clarity, as if I had suddenly managed to focus my binoculars. Earl falls off the boat, dies, and sinks to the bottom, right there at the mouth of the Klamath River. Then these things, these hagfish, or something close, some kind of mutant aberration maybe, don’t ask me, slide into his body, chowing down on his insides, and lay their eggs, or simply go to sleep in there or whatever. A week later, his body gets pulled out of the water and shipped home. He’s in his coffin, being taken to the cemetery, when I manage to hit the hearse with the Sawyer brothers’ truck and knock the coffin into the ditch. And the baby worms get set loose in the ditch water. I figured the difference between freshwater and salt water didn’t bother them much. Look at salmon; they’re born in freshwater, swim downstream into the ocean, into the salt water, then swim back upstream into freshwater to spawn. So the worms, they headed upstream, up the ditch, maybe smelling meat from Slim’s body pit, I don’t know, but they end up in the pit and God knows where else. But they’re in the pit, that’s for goddamn sure, feasting on all those dead carcasses …

And then we had to go and pull one of the steers out for meat.

I shut the book with a snap. I’d read enough. I’d read more than I wanted to. I shook my head to clear out some of the images of those things, of hundreds, even thousands of hagfish inside of a dead whale; those things eating Earl’s guts; the colony of worms in the pit; the worms in the middle of the steer intestines; and the burning pain in Heck’s eyes as he died. I crawled into bed but I didn’t sleep much. And when I did finally drift off, I wished I hadn’t.

I blinked once, twice. I shook my head and looked around. I was sitting in the middle of a small rowboat as it floated out across endless ocean swells that melted into a dull sky. I couldn’t find any oars, so I just hung onto the bench tightly. The wood felt soft and wet, like an old sponge, and I was scared the seat would crumble into wet splinters under my fingers. Fishhooks and old fishing lines lay in a tangled heap at the bottom of the boat.

I sensed a pale sun somewhere behind me, floating just beyond the low clouds, giving the water and sky a flat, gray color. I risked turning my head to look behind me for any sign of land and the little boat tilted to one side with a sickening feeling. For one gut-wrenching moment, I felt the tiny craft lurch over and I thought I was going to fall in. So I whipped my head back, desperately trying to find the balance that had kept me safe this long. Naturally, the boat rolled over unsteadily the other way. I clutched the wooden sides and shifted slightly, and the boat’s rocking slowly subsided.

The wind died.

I felt something on my head and looked up, felt soft wetness splash my face. It was raining. The drops felt unnaturally warm, like a shower. I spread my arms, momentarily forgetting where I was, and let the rain gently wash my fear away. The water ran down my naked chest and back, cleansing and refreshing. It felt … wonderful. I opened my mouth, drinking in as much of the rain as I could. It tasted sweet, and I swallowed. But as it trickled down my throat, it left a foul aftertaste, like something had died long ago and had been soaking in the water ever since.

I closed my mouth suddenly and opened my eyes.

The raindrops were now a dark, unsettling color. I pulled my arms back in and tried to wipe off my face, my shoulders, my chest, but it was no use. I was covered in slimy, brackish water. It gave off a sick odor as well, like fish that had washed up on a cold, desolate beach and had taken a long time to decompose. The rowboat was rapidly filling up with rainwater.

And it was beginning to sink.

I spit off to the side, trying to clear my mouth of the ugly aftertaste, and breathed through clenched teeth. The gob of spit floated slowly away on water that was now flat as glass. I looked down; the discolored water was now up to my ankles. The hooks and lines floated around in it like a confused spiderweb. I pulled my bare feet quickly out and propped them in the bow of the boat.

A splash.

The floating ball of spit was gone, leaving nothing but expanding circles of ripples.

Despite the color of the rain, the ocean seemed clearer somehow, as if the lack of swells made the depths more visible. I could see speckled, constantly shifting bands of weak sunlight stabbing down into the gloom. Something dark was moving down there. It glided slowly, almost lazily, into the shafts of light, moving upward.

My heart began to beat a little faster and I felt a sudden sense of vertigo, as if I were floating above an immense sky, so I cautiously centered myself in the boat. The gut-churning vertigo made my hands shake. It felt as if I was about to fall from an immense cliff.

The rain continued, and the water in the bottom of the boat got deeper. I brought my hands together and cupped them, trying not to upset the balance while flinging water out of the boat. A crack appeared in the floorboards, growing silently until it disappeared beneath me. A tiny group of bubbles grew from within the narrow space of the crack and floated gently to the surface. They broke and fizzed quietly.

I tried to bail faster.

The dark shape got closer. It was big. Several other shapes joined the first. They swam in wide, slow circles, always creeping upward. I kept trying to hurl water from the sinking craft. One of the thing’s backs finally broke the surface, right under my hands. The skin was rotting. I could see the remains of scales, but these were peeling away, revealing spongy, infected flesh.

Another shape rolled through the water nearby. It rose up and sluggishly slid along the surface long enough for me to catch a quick glimpse of a huge, puckered mouth with many, many small teeth, then dove into the depths and vanished.

The rain came down even harder, driving the small boat deeper into the warm ocean. The horizon tilted drunkenly to the left, and I desperately tried to climb up onto the right side. For a second, this helped to balance the craft, until the entire rowboat cracked in half.

And just as I pitched headfirst into the dark, silent water, the alarm went off.

I was up and moving quickly despite my lack of sleep and the bruises that left me stiff and sore, slogging through wet fields in a straight path to Fat Ernst’s restaurant. I sure as hell didn’t want to be late, not on a morning when I was supposed to get my paycheck. But I had another reason for getting to work earlier, one that had nothing to do with getting paid. I didn’t want Fat Ernst around for what I had to do.

The wind screamed up out of the valley, driving rain into the foothills and whipping the drops past my face almost horizontally. One field to go. I just had to climb a fence, hike across a flooded pasture, then scoot down the highway a few hundred yards. I had put Grandpa’s boot on the bottom strand of barbed wire and slung my other leg over the top of the fence when I heard the sound of screeching, sliding tires behind me.

My first thought was that the Sawyer brothers had found me again, right in this precarious position with my balls suspended a few inches over angry barbed wire. I saw who really was behind me and almost wished it had been Junior and Bert.

A pickup slid to a stop next to me in a flurry of splattered mud. Slim stared out of the window with sunken eyes. His face was pale, drawn. He stared at me for a few quiet seconds, and from the expression on his face I wasn’t sure if he was going to drive away or shoot me on the spot.

Finally he spoke. “That’s private property, boy.” He sounded like he’d swallowed a fistful of dry fertilizer.

I didn’t know if I should climb off the fence or not, so I kind of froze there. “Um, just heading to work,” I said.

“Work.” He coughed and brought his ever-present handkerchief up to his mouth. He automatically checked the contents, stowed it safely back in the pocket of jeans. He swallowed, grimacing as he did so, and turned back to me. “What’s going on in that goddamn kitchen?”

“What? I don’t know …”

“I haven’t felt right since eating that cheeseburger yesterday. My guts are burnin’ up. Feel like I gotta shit, but nothin’s comin’ out.” With a quivering arm, he slid the gearshift into
PARK
. “So I want to know what the hell is going on. Where’d Ernst get that meat?”